What Family Dinners Can and Can’t Do for Teens

My print column this week — my last as the Numbers Guy for The Wall Street Journal — looks back at one of my first, about the importance of family dinners. In 2005, I wrote about a report from a group affiliated with Columbia University, called the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse or CASAColumbia, finding that teens who eat dinner more often with their families were at lower risk of using illegal drugs.

Since then, CASAColumbia has released seven more reports on the importance of family dinners, the latest in Sept. 2012, which found that teens who have dinner more frequently with their families are more likely to have other characteristics linked to lower rates of druge use. Since my last column on the topic, many other researchers also have focused on the potential benefits of family gatherings around the dinner table.

The topic is attractive to researchers for several reasons. Since just about everyone eats dinner, and knows the concept of family dinner, it doesn’t bias survey results as, say, a question about family walks might pick up more about the walkability of a family’s neighborhood than about its cohesiveness. Family dinner also is easy to explain in survey questions. “It’s easy to measure, it’s very objective, and everybody knows what you’re talking about,” said Frank Elgar, associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal.

Results from the surveys also translate well into prescriptions for parenting. While some researchers prefer to measure parenting style and family climate, what Elgar calls “very nuanced” concepts, “those sorts of data probably are more useful to researchers, clinicians, and theorists,” he said. “To a parent, they’re a little bit gobbledygook. There’s something about family dinners that suggests a strategy.”

“All the things that really matter are actually very difficult to measure,” Elgar added. “We’re really in the soft underbelly of social sciences. “To me, as a measurement guy, that’s something appealing about family dinners. It’s something simple to measure that can tell you quite a lot.”

The lure of family dinners as a research subject is helped by its effectiveness in attracting media interest. “It’s one of those ones that’s always going to be tractable with the media, which you know will always have a good readership,” said James White, an epidemiologist at Cardiff University who has studied family meals’ effects on child behavior. “It’s immediately accessible and understandable, and it’s something we all do, and something that chimes. The intuition is that eating meals with family is a good thing. Any research enforcing something seen to be a good thing anyway is something I’ve found tends to go over well with the media.”

“There’s something that resonates with family dinners, at least in my brief experience with the media,” Elgar said. He added, “It has this sort of nostalgic, Norman Rockwell thing.”

Media interest can even lead to coverage of studies that may never have existed. When I first wrote about the topic in 2005, I received a reader email pointing out that many articles on the value of family dinners said a study found National Merit Scholarship recipients ate frequently with their families. I contacted a spokeswoman for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, who said she tired of answering questions about the mythical study, which the group neither conducted nor had any evidence existed. A spokesman for the National Merit Scholarship Corp. this week said he, too, knew of no such study.

However, there are risks to reading too much into the links between more family dinners and less substance use by teens. “A problem with a lot of analyses out there on family meals is they don’t account for established protective factors like parental monitoring and family connectedness,” White said. In other words, parents who dine often with their teenage children are also more likely to be connected with, and monitor, their kids. And it’s difficult to know if those factors, rather than the dinner frequency itself, is suppressing substance use.

Then, White said, there is the potential for “reverse causal effects” — less substance use creating opportunities for more dinner with parents, or more substance use getting in the way of family meals. “If you’re eating a meal with your parents, you’re unlikely to be out with your friends, doing things you shouldn’t do,” he said. Also, “Over time, if addiction is taking hold, you’re going to reduce how frequently you spend time with your parents.”

In a study this year, Elgar and coauthors found links between family dinners and positive outcomes for children. However, he wasn’t convinced dinners were the cause. “The best I can guess is this is just a proxy of other family characteristics that are beneficial,” Elgar said. “I’m reluctant to overinterpret this as a result of dinners.”

Emily Feinstein, senior policy analyst at CASAColumbia, pointed out that the group’s most recent report, which she wrote, acknowledged the inability to establish causal links. “We can’t tell the causality or direction of relationships we identify,” she said. Feinstein added, “I can only speak to what our research has found — a consistently positive association.”

Daniel P. Miller, assistant professor of human behavior at the Boston University School of Social Work, praised the quality of CASAColumbia’s surveys. “They use good survey methodology,” he said. However, pointing out that the group self-publishes its findings, Miller added, “They’re not subject to any kind of expert review.”

Pushing families to dine more often together, without underlying positive and supportive relationships, may not help much. “When families get along, dinners reinforce relationships,” said Kelly Musick, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied family dinners with collaborator Ann Meier. “When families don’t get along, there is no effect, and even a little suggestion they’re even not so great for adolescents.”

“The only danger is, by not communicating the uncertainty” of findings on benefits from family dinner, White said, “you may be pushing people to do it when it’s not wholly a good thing. If you force people to eat meals together, it may create an atmosphere that is more negative.” He added, “What occurs at mealtimes is more important than having meals together.”

Sharon Fruh, associate professor of nursing at the University of South Alabama, outlined in an email a number of ways for parents to make family meals constructive and beneficial. Among them: Parents should plan ahead; eliminate distractions by turning off cellphones; and ask children to share their high and low points of the day.

Miller and collaborators published a study last year calling into question the benefits of family dinners for improving adolescent behavior. However, he isn’t a critic of family dinners, per se. “I have a family, I have kids,” he said. “We still try to eat meals together and I would encourage other families to do so. I think we need to be a bit more cautious in the things we attribute to family meals, though.”

Added Musick, “The general message of, find a time to connect with kids — it’s hard to argue with that.”

About The Numbers

The Wall Street Journal examines numbers in the news, business and politics. Some numbers are flat-out wrong or biased, while others are valid and help us make informed decisions. We tell the stories behind the stats in occasional updates on this blog.